Retirement pensions to be indexed to real inflation from next March

The Labor Ministry announced yesterday that starting next year pension benefits will be indexed by actual inflation, rather than the forecast figure, as has been the case until now. Thanks to this change, increases in pensions should become more predictable and understandable for the public, but in real terms pensioners would not feel the difference. After the Central Statistical Office (GUS) publishes the official inflation figure for 2002 next February, starting from March, pensions would be indexed by that ratio plus up to 20% of the increase in real wages recorded in the previous year. One of the reasons for the change are complaints from pensioners about their minuscule pension increases this year. The reason these will only increase by 0.5% in 2002 is that last year pension increases were significantly exceeded inflation. (Gazeta Wyborcza, p. 1) T.J.